“It’s not a story you can kiss better, but he kisses him all the same, wrapping both arms around his slender waist.”
I’ve mentioned before that my ten before the end was derailed by library holds – the most recent was Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2025). The slender volume has whispers of Booker-type, blending fact and fiction in 1970s Italian cinema in a way that is at times both opulent and scarce. Unfortunately, the novel never reached its full potential for this reader.
Dubbed a queer love story with a noirish quality, the novel is set in the months leading up to the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975. The story alternates POVs between Nicholas / Nico (a young English artist on the run) and Danilo Donati / Dani (the renowned Italian custom and set designer). Danilo is a real figure; Nico and his relationship with the designer is fiction. Dani takes Nico under his wing, as both a lover and an apprentice. Nico draws buildings and images that Dani will in turn work his magic on for the set. Their relationship is built on questionable grounds with significant power imbalance, but I will concede there is a love story here between the tortured young artist and the older man.
Dani and Nico are working on Pasolini’s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, young Nico wholly unaware and naïve as to the dangers, even after Pasolini is severely beaten. Nico’s flight from England following the death of a lover is likely where the novel gets the noirish label, and Laing does initially feed that by giving hints that Nico was involved in the man’s death. Is he running because he killed a man or is he running from grief or is he running from a ghost? I thought Alan’s death would factor in a bit more, but it was a bit of a bust. Other than making Nico a bit morose and random hints at a haunting, Alan seems a crutch to prop Nico up and a bridge to a relationship with Pasolini. Nico is not a well-developed character even though there are numerous opportunities to add a wee bit of flesh. Any spark of interest about him is quickly dimmed – even at the end when he becomes unwittingly involved in a series of events that will have Pasolini murdered.
Liang does a way with words, and they clearly did their research into the time period, the theories surrounding Pasolini and the film, and the other larger than life characters. Their reliance on the pretty flat Nico to propel the story forward kept the novel from reaching its full potential.
A Girl Named Tommi 